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Building a directory website can be an expensive venture. This is especially true if you are looking to build something from scratch that is completely custom designed. You’ll also need to maintain the website, both from the backend and front. After all, your site needs to run smoothly and contain updated directory information.

However, it is easier than ever to build a custom directory website using WordPress plugins. Whether you want to create a job board, real estate, restaurant, business, or services directory, there is a directory plugin out there to suit your needs.

And, it just so happens we have insight into some of the very best on the market today.

Gravity Forms is one of the most popular premium contact form plugins on the market today. It’s user-friendly and has plenty of features packed into it make it a desirable WordPress tool.

What a lot of people don’t know, however, is that Gravity Forms can also be used for creating surveys, quizzes, adding user submitted content, and yes even creating directories on your website. In fact, it has features like built-in searching, user-submitted directory listings, lightbox support, and the ability to view each listing on their own.

Additional features include:

Price: FREE (as an add-on to premium Gravity Forms plugin)

Business Directory Plugin is one of the most popular free directory plugins in the WordPress Repository. To start, it aims to boost site visitor interaction with your site, improve customer retention, and even allows you to add a monetization element to your website for increased revenue generation.

Build any kind of directory you want with this WordPress plugin – local, business providers, Yellow-Pages style, address book, even a Yelp-like review section – with a few configurations. Additionally, customize the form fields for user directory submissions, enable image options (including an intuitive drag & drop function), and accept payments for displaying a directory on your website.

Additional features include:

Price: FREE

Connections Business Directory boasts being a popular and simple directory plugin for WordPress website owners of all levels. It is versatile by design, flexible to use, and provides only the features you need to create a directory listing for your site, without the added bloat.

Personalize the directory experience and view things such as anniversaries and birthdays of users in the WordPress dashboard. To add to that, Connections offers unique entry types – individuals, organizations, and even families – perfect for keeping individuals together for an address book directory. Lastly, add business logos, images, and even biographical information of all people in a listing, easily scale your listing to accommodate 1000s of listings, and even import and export listings as needed.

Additional features include:

Price: FREE

Sabai Directory is a premium business directory plugin for WordPress designed to help you create community business directories like Yelp.com, Google+ Places, or Yahoo! Local. Packed with tons of features for customizing the look of your directory, and making it function exactly as you need it to, this directory plugin is a great solution.

Display listings in list, grid, or map views for a better viewing experience. Enable the highly functioning search feature that searches keywords, categories, distance, and location, and even provides auto-suggestions.  Add rating criteria such as price, quality, service, etc. so site visitors can narrow their search results. More so, allow users to post their own reviews and ratings, upload images, and comment on other reviews.

Additional features include:

Price: $29

Directory Pro is another excellent WordPress directory plugin making directory creation a cinch. With responsive design and mobile-friendliness, rest assured all site visitors, even those on the go, will see your site just as you want it to render.

Fully sync your site with PayPal and Stripe payment gateways for paid listings, gather email addresses of all new user’s for further marketing opportunities, and even use any of the popular WordPress plugins to make sure your site gets indexed and found in search results. Plus, translate all of your site’s content using the popular WPML translation plugin.

Additional features include:

Price: $34

Simple Link Directory is for those looking for a simpler directory plugin solution that still gets the job done. Best used for content curation and one-page listing directories, this plugin is suitable for bloggers, SEO specialists, content curators, marketers, and webmasters.

Create a unique one-page link directory to complement your existing WordPress website and give your readers additional value and more reasons to visit your website. In addition, add a short listing description, complete with a logo and link to the listing’s website.  Then, add the listing anywhere on your website using the shortcode generator.

Additional features include:

Price: FREE

In the end, you always have the option to custom design a directory website. And, if you have the resources, know-how, and budget to do so, that’s awesome!

However, for those looking for a simpler solution, one that is more affordable, less time-consuming, and works just as well as any custom built directory website, there are WordPress directory plugins available.

If you are looking to share with your site visitors the best of the best when it comes to businesses, restaurants, and more, take advantage of the directory plugins above and get site building today.

A couple of months ago I was exploring with my blog the possibility of expanding my reach beyond Google. As part of the team at WordLift, we run several experiments on a weekly basis to understand what strategies and tactics make search engines prefer web pages over others.

That is why I decided to investigate more into it to find out if there was a way to optimise for a search engine called DuckDuckGo (DDG).

Eventually, as I ran those experiments, I noticed that traffic from DuckDuckGo started to pick up. In fact, If I look at the last 30 days organic traffic, Google still weights over 64.9%. Yet DDG is now at 26.1%, compared to the rest, about 9%. Not bad considering that a month before my site didn’t earn any organic traffic from DDG.

That is not by chance. DDG plays a key role in the search engine industry and therefore for your SEO strategy.

When DDG launched in 2008 as a side project, it showed it could succeed. In fact, it was one of the few search engines that could compete with Google when it comes to quality of search results. Not surprisingly its growth compounded in the last almost ten years. Even if still small - in comparison to Google - DDG is picking up:

Over fourteen million queries each day, on average, go through DuckDuckGo. Yet on September 25th, DDG hit its historical record, over nineteen million queries. Therefore if you’re missing out the opportunity to reach over fourteen million users - on average - each day you may be missing a huge opportunity.

Also, I believe DDG will keep growing for several reasons, tied to the way it works.

DDG is quite different from other search engines. First, it doesn’t track its users. Therefore, it prevents the so-called search leakage that happens when you search through Google or other search engines. Privacy today is a major concern and also a propeller for DDG growth.

Also, in my opinion, DDG offers a better experience compared to other search engines because the advertising you see is based on the keywords you input in the search bar. In short, it relies on what you need here and now, rather than on cookies that follows you around the net. Second, DDG is a hybrid search engine. This aspect is relevant for who practices SEO.

DuckDuckGo isn’t unconventional only from the business standpoint. In fact, it makes money through traditional ads and affiliate marketing. But also in the way it works:

DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also, of course, have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.-- DuckDuckGo Sources

In short, DDG is a mixture of crawling and directories used to give back a result page. However DDG’s crawlers, the so-called DuckDuckBot do not create any index but rather have more maintenance purpose. Instead, DDG leverages on over 400 directories and on other search engine APIs to build its index.

What about its crawler, the so-called DuckDuckBot?

DuckDuckBot although a crawler, only does certain tasks. In fact, apparently, it doesn’t index the web. At least from a discussion of 2014 submitted by @mlissner on stack overflow:

In other words, even though DuckDuckBot looks at the web it does it to perform particular tasks, which only in part affects DDG index, thus rankings.

The next question that pops to mind is, how does DuckDuckGo rank pages?

As CEO and co-founder of DDG, Gabriel Weinberg clarified, DuckDuckGo ranking system uses the underlying APIs, but then adds a layer of intelligence to re-rank, omit and merge results to for its rankings.

Besides, to the question “What's the source of DuckDuckGo search results?” On Quora, Caine Tighe, DuckDuckGo’s CTO says:

Further, as specified on DDG website:

The ranking is a bit opaque and difficult to discern/communicate on an individual query basis because of all the various factors involved (and which change frequently).

Nevertheless, the best way to get good rankings (in pretty much all search engines) is to get links from high-quality sites like Wikipedia.-- DuckDuckGo help

If the way they rank content is a bit opaque and difficult to determine on a single query basis, there are a few strategies we can implement to improve your chances to have a page ranked through DuckDuckGo.

Backlinks de facto contributed to the creation of the web as we know it. Even though search engines, like Google, use now AI to understand the context of a query and return a result that goes beyond keywords. Backlinks are still a crucial signals to determine whether the source of that content can be trusted. Therefore, creating a strategy that is focused on earning quality backlinks is an important step.

Since DDG uses the underlying APIs from other search engines, like Yahoo, Yandex and Bing, make sure to submit your website to those engines. It only takes a few minutes but can make a huge difference. By submitting your sites to other search engines, you’ll make sure to be indexed by DuckDuckGo.

Go on and submit your website to Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.

Another way to give direct access to users to your site and improving your chances of getting traffic is to submit your Bang!

That is an excellent feature that allows having direct access to a website page or category. For instance, if you type into DDG search box “!amazon shoes” you’ll get direct access to that page.

You can suggest DuckDuckGo add a bang for a website in a few seconds.

Source: DuckDuckGo

If your bang will get approved then you’re creating new qualified avenues toward your website.

Another important aspect of how DuckDuckGo works is based on the sources that are taken into account to form its index. In other words, my reasoning is simple. If you get into DDG’s index, then you’re closer to be ranked. Yet while for now, you may not be able to optimise directly for DDG you can optimise indirectly, by making sure your content is in DDG sources.

Since DuckDuckGo uses more than 400 sources you could optimise for some of them that work well with your content marketing strategy. For instance, I searched “Who’s Gennaro Cuofano” in DuckDuckGo to see where it was picking up the answers,

I ran several queries and looked at all the pages it picked up. An interesting pattern that comes out is that you can use some platforms like Goodreads, LinkedIn, Quora, beBee, Amazon to get ranked. At the same time, make sure to share it through other communities like Reddit, Hacker News and Stack Overflow.

In short, you have to repurpose your content through those platforms so that it will be featured through DuckDuckGo. Therefore, the more you make sure to repurpose your content the more you may get ranked through DDG.

Another fascinating aspect is that the second result is a page coming from my website! Yet that is not a standard page.

The page that DDG likes is a page that has structured data in the form of JSON-LD. This is not surprising as the most popular search engines, like Google, love structured data. But what is that?

Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.

Google uses structured data that it finds on the web to understand the content of the page, as well as to gather information about the internet and the world in general.-- Google Developers

Therefore structured data helps Google understand what a page or website is about. The reason is simple. If you feed structured data toward search engines you’re saving them time and providing data that crawlers can process way more quickly and with a better understanding of it.

Especially JSON-LD. In fact, that is a lightweight format that allows creating linked data. In short, where you have a piece of content the JSON-LD translates that in data, which gets linked. This also contributes to building a smarter web. Tools like WordLift allows you to create structured data in JSON-LD format in a few clicks.

DDG is a search engine that has been around for almost ten years. It focuses on privacy and as of today over fourteen million average daily queries go through DuckDuckGo. If you’re missing out on it, you’re losing a great opportunity of generating quality traffic toward your site.

Besides privacy, DDG is different from any other engine because it is a hybrid engine. In other words, it uses its crawlers and other APIs to form its index. However, DuckDuckBot does not contribute to the indexing of the pages but rather to perform certain tasks. Instead, other search engines underlying APIs are used to form its index. But the ranking is created by adding a layer of intelligence from DDG’s algorithms.

In addition, DuckDuckGo uses over 400 sources, some of them (like Wikipedia) are vertical sources. To optimise for DuckDuckGo, you can follow those strategies:

Did you follow those strategies to optimise your website? Ok, it’s time to Duck it!

* Adapted lead image:  Public Domain, pixabay.com via getstencil.com

AccountantsWorld Website Relief

www.accountantsworld.com

From the 2017 review of Website Builders for Accounting Firms.

Website Relief is well suited to accounting firms of all sizes that currently utilize other AccountantsWorld applications, though the product can also be used as a stand-alone application if desired. Website Relief uses professionally designed themes, with users able to choose the theme that best fits their needs. All websites are optimized for use with a variety of devices, including smart phones and tablets.

Website Relief provides a variety of standard and suggested content for each website. Website Relief takes a look at the company profile that is completed when signing up, suggesting content that is a good fit. Sample text is also provided, with users able to simply use the content as created by Website Relief, of edit the information to better suit their firm. A good selection of standard pages are also included with each website, such as a Home Page and an About Us Page, along with a Tax Center, Payroll Center, and Tax Refund Page. Other standard pages available include Partners’ Profile, Services, Useful Resources & Links, FAQs, Testimonials, and a Contact Us page. A variety of automated content such as financial and paycheck calculators, and newsletter options are also available. One nice feature is the ability to edit professionally written articles to make the content more relevant to their current client base.

Website Relief supports an unlimited number of pages for each website, with users able to simply create custom pages and upload them directly to the application if desired. The product also supports the use of video and animation on any website created.

All Website Relief users receive a free custom domain name, along with five custom-branded email addresses and 10 GB of storage. Additional email addresses can be obtained at an additional cost if necessary.

The Website Relief Dashboard provides users with all of the tools they need to create and customize their website. Users can choose from a wide variety of themes offered by the application, with photos available to utilize as well. A design tool is also included in Website Relief that allows users to quickly create a functioning website with the ability to edit and customize the site later.

A variety of accounting and related forms are also available, with users also given the option to design their own forms to encourage potential clients to contact the firm via the website, including requesting information on services, requesting an appointment or signing up for a newsletter or other communication forum. Another great feature is the ability for firms to create a blog and easily incorporate it directly into the website.

Website Relief offers easy integration with social media in order to help bolster online visibility. For those interested in SEO results, a series of tutorials are available that help guide users through various search engine optimization options, while also working to submit the website to major search engines which include Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The product also allows users to easily link their completed website to social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, along with a link to Google Maps, which provides access to an interactive map for clients. Users can also integrate their website with Google Analytics, which will display various statistics and website data directly on the user dashboard.

Another benefit of purchasing Website Relief is that all firms receive a basic listing in a tax directory, with the option to upgrade to a premium listing for an additional cost.

AccountantsWorld and Website Relief offer users a variety of web-based seminars that assist new users with basic website creation. Unlimited product support is available to all AccountantsWorld subscribers, with users able to access support personnel using a variety of options including telephone, email, and chat. A Contact Us form is also available for users to utilize as well. In addition, each firm that subscribes to AccountantsWorld applications is assigned a professional development consultant.

In addition to custom website creation, Website Relief also offers an unlimited number of integrated client portals at no additional cost, making it easy for clients and firms to easily share, upload, and download documents securely.

Designed to integrate with other AccountantsWorld applications including Accounting Power, Cloud Cabinet, Directory Listing, Practice Relief, and After-the-Fact Payroll, AccountantsWorld Website Relief is available for $595.00 per year, with a 30-day money back guarantee. The product can also be used as a stand-alone website building application if firms are using another software vendor for practice management and tax preparation.